Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., right, talks with Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., on July 16. Corker led a successful effort to adopt an alternative process for congressional review of the nuclear agreement with Iran that stacked the deck in favor of the White House.

If you’re anxious about the agreement that the United States and its allies recently struck with Iran over its nuclear program … well, you’re not being paranoid. Because this deal A) gives Tehran well over $100 billion in walking-around money, B) doesn’t even attempt to dismantle the country’s nuclear program, and C) essentially solemnizes Tehran’s status as one of the dominant powers in the region, there is no cause for optimism.

Make no mistake about it: The U.S. has signed on to an agreement that will be accompanied by a body count.

Now, that’s troubling enough on the merits. But, truth be told, we should be equally disturbed by the fact that a political atmosphere exists in this country that allows a deal like this to be regarded as anything more than a farce in the first place.

Under the provisions set out in the Constitution, the president is required to submit international treaties to the Senate, where they require a two-thirds majority to receive approval. In an upper chamber where 54 members are Republicans, it would be virtually impossible for President Obama to clear that hurdle. So, in typical fashion, the commander in chief found a legal workaround: He simply declared that the Iran deal doesn’t count as a treaty.

Worried that Congress would be cut out of the process entirely, Tennessee Republican Sen. Bob Corker led a successful effort to adopt an alternative process for congressional review – one that stacked the deck in favor of the White House. Instead of limiting assent to the Senate, as per the Constitution’s stipulation, it also includes a vote in the House of Representatives. And, instead of requiring a two-thirds majority to approve the agreement, it requires a two-thirds majority to reject it over a presidential veto.

Long story short: The president – with the assent of Congress – has completely inverted the traditional legal protocols. Mr. Obama will have his way if he can persuade just 34 senators or 145 members of the House to side with him.

In a republic that took its own laws and mores more seriously, this abdication of constitutional responsibility would be a national scandal. But we’ve long since slipped those moorings. Every organ of the federal government has now broken its leash.

While the men and women who are dismantling the system deserve our opprobrium, so, too, does the electorate that enables them. Once a critical mass of Americans care more about reaching their preferred outcome than abiding by the rule of law, we become an utterly conventional nation – one that substitutes the whims of our rulers for the enduring principles of our Constitution.

If that erosion continues apace, historians one day will look back at this era with confusion. They’ll have to conclude that the most powerful nation in the history of the world owed its decline not to foreign invasion or economic calamity, but to the fact that its citizens stopped believing in their own creeds.

In the long run, that may prove a much greater threat to America than anything coming out of Tehran.